It Can't be Helped
by Departures
Summary: Is there something nauseatingly serene about the Ishidas and Takaishis? But something fascinatingly wrong? A series of drabbles about Takeru, Yamato, and their parents: Natsuko and Hiroaki.
1. Anchor

Yamato gnaws on his lip, gilded eyebrows knit in tormented contemplation.

Hiroaki loosens his tie, fingers functioning drowsily. He lapses into the chair at the table in the silent apartment that doesn't remind him of anything but cardboard boxes and cold coffee.

"Dad," the son says delicately, "are you going to remarry someday?"

Hiroaki sees his son, sees the only face that he will see in the claustrophobia-provoking apartment, the only face that he sees clearly because he doesn't really care for any other nameless ones. He sees his son and he sees the bleak wall clock telling him it's two in the morning, identifies his son's handwriting on the note that's anchored by the remote.

"No," the father replies. "It will just be you and me from now on."

And he sees the unsteadiness in Yamato's young face withdraw, sees that he stops harassing his lip.


	2. Grief

Natsuko hopes that Hiroaki's mouth will bandage any threatening wounds. And he does, it does, when the nights are endless and stimulating and insomnia is an encouraging plague. His mouth shelters her shoulder while his enthusiastic hands sketch detailed maps on her back; she prints fraught words into his skin with her fingers. There's a wound between her breasts, on the inside of her soft thigh. His mouth travels, and it's hot and slow and hot and she can't stomach it, him – Hiroaki knows, and his poignant mouth is on hers again, hoping to seal that wound, too.


	3. Yamato's Fist

"Stop being negative all over my ideas, all right?... Yeah? …I'd like to hear you try to come up with a solution… We're stick in this world and all you're doing is - what? That's not what I meant... Forget it… Just – shut up and leave again, okay? ...It was a joke. See? I'm laughing… Don't be mad. I'm not. Not anymore… We're a team. All eight of us can get through this together... Really... You're being serious... What?... Say that again! …Seriously, Yamato? …Your mom."


	4. Inspiration

"Takeru," Hikari sighs ecstatically, outstretching the last syllable in his name so that it's as long and magical as a kite string, "I can't believe you're living in Odaiba..." She's stumbling now. "...Did – I mean..." Her voice is the breeze: "Are you parents together again?"

Takeru frowns with his entire body but tries to smile anyway, because that's how he is, but Hikari, whose delicate chin had been poised in the palm of her small hand, tauts embarrassedly. "I'm sorry," and then rants, "I just thought that since you and your mom moved here, maybe something with your family – I would have been happy – I will be, when it happens. If it does... But of course it will, and if it doesn't then it'll be okay-"

Hikari's voice is invisible. Takeru is the endless sky, and the string on the kite is snipped and the kite glides away into the blue of his mind's eye, hopeful and nostalgic and homey and dysfunctional.


	5. Convenience Store

"Ramen, laundry detergent, a marker... Are you sure you're grocery shopping, Yamato?" (The words are punctuated with beeps and electronic clicks as numbers flash in green across a monitor.)"Doesn't your mother shop for your family?"

"I don't have a mother," Yamato says automatically.

Takeru's face jerks in sorrow – the corners of his amiable lips fall and his mouth is a pale rainbow of unaccepted fate. Resentment that stemmed from different events in his life had attached itself to the pump in his body years before, and the pure, candy-like surge of reality eruptively turns blue with suffocating anger and is released by a unwilled grunt.

"I mean she doesn't live with me," Yamato fixes.

Miyako (who thinks her apron is ghastly, that the responsibility of operating the family convenience store is wrongly trusted in the hands of a thirteen-year-old) looks at the brothers and nods awkwardly.


	6. Collide

He needs to take a leak and forgets that he's in a different apartment with different cracks along the walls that don't symbolize the fissures and rifts between himself and Natsuko, doesn't notice that he can't see the cracks because the different apartment is solid black. He collides into a wall. Winces, recoils, rubs his smarting nose. It aches somewhere else too, somewhere inside, somewhere... he stumbles somewhat guardedly over the cold floorboards, mistrustful of the shrill silence and unpacked boxes. He's pissed off and in need of a piss, and even when his bare feet collide with the iciness of the bathroom tiles he isn't sated. Stupid pain is swelling around the middle of his face and he doesn't flick the light switch on – he's peeing in the dark, taking his time, feeling stupid, feeling stupid, feeling... disquieted.


	7. Certainties

"Will you marry me?" Hiroaki asks with a naked look on his face, dropping onto both of his knees in the middle of a summer day when the heat is at its highest, in the middle of the street when the traffic is at a standstill, clasping her hands in his.

The sun is whithering her updo, searing the back of her neck as she tilts her head to disassemble Hiroaki's daydream. Natsuko sees herself in his sleepy brown eyes and she's happy, because of him. She can visualize herself beside him everlastingly: asleep, awake, heartsick, enraged, content, but in love and alive.

"You're going to get run over," she says, tugging his hands.

Hiroaki grins widely. "Is that a yes?"

She bends down and fervently presses her lips against his.


	8. Wicker

"Hiroaki, you're scaring him," Natsuko, three months pregnant as told by the calender that thirstily checks off the sunrises and sunsets until the due date of her second child, scolds gently, a smile pinching the corners of her lips. She perches herself on the wicker chair behind her husband quietly as he laughs, saying everything's under control. (She doesn't hear his promise though, because she hasn't heard him laugh very often, and it's idyllic). He is playing with a two year old Yamato, manipulating a black, hairy, simulated spider that jumps whenever Yamato looks at it. The cord extending from the spider to the undisguised pump in Hiroaki's hand is glaringly apparent, but Yamato looks at the toy with fused curiosity and fear, oblivious.

"I think he's sleeping now," Hiroaki tells his son, and because his shoulders are relaxed, because his head cants slightly, Natsuko knows he's smiling.

Yamato steps toward the spider tentatively, glancing at Hiroaki questioningly. "Sleeping?" he repeats.

Hiroaki nods. "Sleeping."

The toddler is kneeled beside the toy, his small hand inches away from its eyes – it jumps, daunting Yamato, who yells happily, leaping into his father's arms. They are both laughing.

"It bit me," Hiroaki says, showing Yamato fake fang marks on his wrist.

Concerned, their son inspects the area, wiping it off with his fingers. "No more, no more hurt!" he exclaims proudly.

"Thank you, Yamato."

"Spider?" he asks, innocently, stirring his mother's feelings. "Spider sleeping?"

"I don't know..." Another amused smile. "Go check."

Yamato turns to the spider again. Hiroaki's thumb contracting, it jumps.

Natsuko leans forward. "I love you," she murmurs in her husband's ear, casting her hands around his shoulders from behind. Hiroaki – grinning widely, she can feel it now – sedates, reaching to caress her cheek.


	9. Roles

"I'm not wearing_ that_-"

"Why not?"

"Look at it. It's freakin' _pink_. It has ruffles."

"They didn't have anything else at the store-"

"What type of store did you go to?"

"Just put it on and cook. I'm hungry."

"I'll cook, but get that away from me."

"If you don't wear it you'll get your clothes dirty again."

"I'll wash them."

"You don't know how to get the stains out."

"Why don't you wear it?"

"Because I don't know how to cook-"

"I'll teach you."

"I don't wanna learn-"

"Here, catch-"

"Wait, what?"

"Put it on."

"You're supposed to cook, not me."

"I'm gonna teach you."

"Dad, I can't wear this... It's _pink_."

"You bought it, Yamato. You wear it."

"Yeah, yeah. I'm hungry, okay? Stop laughing and help me make something..."


	10. Identities

"Who're you?"

"Takeru."

He sees one dark green eye peering at him wonderingly, half of the boy's face eclipsed by the ajar door.

"So?" he responds, not unkindly but not friendly.

"I'm... uh, here for Yamato."

The door creaks open a little more, enough for an eye and a half to appear as the boy says, "He's not here yet... He said he'd be late..." then swings to expose two others boys in the sparsely furnished room, one huddled over keyboards and the other lounging in a sofa, an electric guitar straddling his lap. Takeru follows the red head, who motions with drum sticks for him to sit down in a tattered armchair.

The keyboard player stops noodling and openly calculates Takeru through thick rimmed glassed. There's a glare on the lenses. "Who're you?"

"Yamato's brother."

There's a spotlight bouncing off Keyboard Player's glasses as he tilts his head, as he grins. "Oh, _you're_ Takeru."

Drumsticks Kid hands Takeru a can of soda after he emerges from ransacking a mini refrigerator in the corner. "You two do look alike..." Guilt smothers his features. "Sorry I was a jerk. Some kids like to mess around here, especially when we're trying to practice..."

"I'm fine."

These people are strangers to him; the storage garage isn't familiar.

"Yamato... has never really talked about you," the guitar player says slowly, cautious of his words. His russet hair falls over his confused eyes.

The Yamato they're mentioning is a stranger to Takeru, but only pieces of him.

Takeru allows a desolate chill to freeze his fingers. "He's never mentioned any of you either."

And they all speak:

"Figures-"

"I'm Takashi, he's Yutaka, and he's Akira-"

"You want some chips, Takeru?"

"When did you move to Odaiba?"

"What grade are you in?"

"Can you play the harmonica too?"

"Do you write any songs?"

"What kinda music do you like?"

"You play an instrument?"

And they all stop in unison, staring expectantly at him; Takeru already felt like he couldn't harmonize with his brother's world.


	11. Brooding

"I can't remember that," Yamato finally confesses to his father as he enters the apartment. Hiroaki peers at him undecidedly from the table as he contemplates his son's motions, mechanically storing groceries in the nearly empty cabinets. When he finishes his task he confronts his father with the wallet.

"I don't remember it," he repeats, brooding patiently.

Hiroaki fingers the creased wallet he hasn't replaced, the one Natsuko gifted to him one content day on the outdated concept that her affinity for him overflowed. But Yamato does not know this; he cannot feel it through the wallet's leather exterior.

"The picture in your wallet," Yamato clears, impaired, and escapes the poignant yet calming feeling that devours his father by withdrawing to his room. Before following Yamato, knocking understandingly on his door, Hiroaki leans forward in his chair, poising his elbows on his knees and sighs into his hands.


	12. Wonder

Her smile devastates him relentlessly.

The day constantly comes to a close by some means, and whether the day came about insanely blissful or if he regrets waking up and pulling on his clothes in the morning is confirmed as irrelevant because she ends up standing by him in all of her radiance, smiling at him, breaking his heart as the beam reaches her eyes and he can feel her, though it has always been distantly.

But he knows no one can actually die of heartbreak.

"Are you saying you're unhappy?" he wants to ask her when her face splits with laughter. When a glow tints her cheeks but she glances away. When her fingers clench together like a nervous twitch, her thumb pressing against her index finger.

In between blinks he thinks about it and decides maybe he is saying he is unhappy too.


	13. Punctuality

Yamato knows what disaster sounds like:

It sounds like his brother's building blocks toppling over, brushing against one another during the short distance to the floor, where gravity wants to break everything on contact if the object is heavy and fragile enough.

It sounds like a dive, like glittering water splashing and then calming.

It sounds like a repressed shriek of some type of emotion that can potentially damage your nervous system, and leave you seeing in black and white.

It sounds like footsteps, like a winter jacket being zipped.

It sounds like two adults with anger in their whispers after his bedtime.

It sounds like his guitar sometimes.

But mostly it sounds like his mother's voice over the phone every year when she calls him on his birthday at approximately the same time his lungs first heaved a cry and she held him, and tragedy looks a lot like Natsuko when Hiroaki withdraws from the Ishida apartment as she enters and holds Yamato once again, refusing to acknowledge her presence.


	14. Genetics

He wonders what it will look like. It's only a collection of cells inside her the first time they learned of its existence, garnering nutrition from his daily pecks on her forehead as he rolls over in the morning, growing despite the cold undercurrent between them, the absence of understanding he sometimes feels, making him shiver against her body. But they've created this together, a little one of 'them', splitting and replicating systematically without being told.

A few surges of excited anxiety overwhelm him at random; wants to ask her if she feels the same way, if having their child so close but unable to see it guides knives through her chest as well. He can't say that he's already attached and doesn't recognize that she feels the same way until tears pour when she first holds Yamato, when nothing exists but Yamato and his tiny sighs as he naps. Hiroaki's tongue is glued down, thinking that he should have known that Yamato would have Natsuko's blond hair of summer and enough blue to tie a poignant knot in his throat.

When Takeru is only a word on Natsuko's lips, Hiroaki again wonders what this baby will look like. But Takeru looks like Yamato, because that's who Yamato seems to love the most once Takeru's giggles fill their lives. And Yamato looks like Natsuko because that's who Hiroaki loves the most, without remorse, without hesitation, without logic or fear. Hiroaki should have known. Of course that's what their children look like.


	15. Circles

Daisuke wonders what Takeru's parents might say, now that the bucket-hat-wearing-boy has sacrificed his seat in the car to Ken. He guesses by parents he means Takeru's mother. Then he goes on to wonder if Takeru's father will ever find out about Takeru ambling in the darkness in solitude, passing circles of light created by streetlights that hum to no one in particular.

"Takeru's a gentle spirit, isn't he?" he says lowly to Hikari. "He's got so many reasons to be angry, but he isn't… I mean, he beat up Ken that one time, but he acts like it didn't happen. He's even embarrassed he did it, even though he was in the right."

"Daisuke…"

"And he doesn't get in trouble at school, or runaway, like some kids do when they're mad at the world. He's always saying something about Yamato or his dad or the TV station or something. A lot of people aren't as understanding…"

"Daisuke, are you okay?" she asks in the midst of his rambling.

"I'm fine," he says, turning to face his reflection in the window. "I was just sayin', Takeru's kind of stupid, I guess."

"I'm glad that Takeru hasn't been hardened," Hikari murmurs.

He pictures Takeru with his hands in his pockets and those circles of light, hat covering his eyes and his thoughts. "That too… Not that we can see."


	16. Hachiko

The first time Yamato rode the train to his mother's apartment, he'd gotten off at the Shibuya train station because he didn't feel like seeing anyone, either driven by resentment for having to travel to spend time with his own brother or by pure absentmindedness after thinking such angry thoughts. He had decided to spend hours at the arcade and then head home to kill time before his mother phoned his father and the truth poured out.

But then he had seen the statue of Hachiko upon leaving the train, the akita dog who waited for his owner to return from work at that very same station, loyally waiting to walk home with him. Even after Hachiko's friend had died at the university where he worked as a professor, the akita dog returned to the station everyday for ten years after, hoping to hear his friend's familiar footsteps, until death took him as well.

Yamato boarded the next train, determined to visit the other half of his family and cold with shame at seeing Hachiko still waiting for someone who would never return even after death. Hachiko's bronze statue had convinced the resentment smothering him to lessen. He had imagined that the dog might have sensed that his friend had crossed some bridge that couldn't be retraced when he didn't return, but that the akita dog had faith, anyway, and that it wouldn't hurt Yamato to have some too, especially when others – like his mother, whose hugs still felt the same as he had remembered them – were waiting for him faithfully.


End file.
